About Diabetes

What is diabetes?

Learning a bit about our body and any health conditions we have goes a long way in helping us manage those conditions and our overall health. Here we learn a bit about how glucose is normally used by the body and what goes wrong in diabetes.

Defining diabetes

Diabetes is a long-term condition in which the levels of glucose (a type of sugar) in the blood are too high. Diabetes occurs when there is a problem with the hormone insulin (which normally controls blood glucose levels), or how it
works in the body.1

Over time, high blood glucose can result in serious health issues, including kidney damage, heart disease, eye damage and nerve damage, just to list a few.1Carefully managing diabetes is key in lowering the risk of these complications.

How insulin normally works

To understand diabetes, we have to first understand how insulin normally works to control blood glucose.Carbohydrates in foods such as bread, pasta and potatoes are digested and released as glucose into the bloodstream.1The glucose in the blood is then taken up by body cells, to be used as energy or to be stored. The hormone insulin, made by the pancreas, acts as a ‘key’ to open the doors (the glucose channels) that let
the glucose move into the body’s cells.1

Types of diabetes

There are two main types of diabetes – type 1 and type 2.

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body’s destroys the insulin-making cells in the pancreas, so insulin is no longer produced. This means the body cells cannot take up glucose and it is left in the bloodstream.1

In type 2 diabetes, the pancreas is still producing insulin but the body’s cells are not responding to it properly (so glucose is not taken up from the bloodstream the way it normally is). This is sometimes
referred to as ‘insulin resistance’ – meaning your body is building resistance to the effect of insulin. As insulin resistance builds, the pancreas cannot keep up with the increasing demand for insulin, resulting
in too much glucose being left in the blood.1

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